You do have to deal with the visas. And most of the houses are in smaller communities. I suspect "lawyer" would be on their list. Especially a native English speaker.

Sadly, no. At least not for my specialty. There's no realistic possibility that I could ever pass the Japanese bar exam in any relevant timeframe - it's notoriously difficult even for graduates of Japanese law schools, and I know neither the language nor any of the particulars of Japanese law. And my particular specialty has no application to international firms or groups that will sometimes hire American lawyers to work in their Japanese offices. Knowing international trade or corporate law might land you a spot, but not real estate or development law as I do.

As I recall, your kids are young. They'd probably flourish in Japan. People help children even if they don't know them... catching trains, running errands, etc. Really amazing. No need to leave them here.

Time passes swiftly, 1pg. Albabygirl is now an Albabywoman - she just graduated high school and is headed off to college in a month. She's not moving to Japan. Albabyboy could come with. But he is about to enter high school, and at that age it would be an insanely difficult adjustment for him to leave all his friends and family and walk into a new country with no language capability. Yes, there's expat schools - but still really, really tough.

Partially, this was just idle wishing with "vacation brain" turned on. Or at least I first thought it was just idle wishing. But as I engaged in that idle wishing, it turns out that retiring to Japan actually is now a really viable option, at least economically. Japan used to be one of the more expensive countries in the world for expats to retire to, but with the utter collapse of the yen it's actually right in the mix with Latin American nations like Costa Rica as a cost effective destination. I didn't realize that. Since they've got a solid health care system and a completely modernized OECD level economy to boot, it's actually an attractive option for retiring abroad. But the visa situation is complicated, and we probably couldn't make it work.